


Do Angels Dream of Electronic Catalogues?

by DownToTheSea



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Crowley being Soft, Fluff, Humor, Missing Scene, Other, and then being annoyed at himself for being Soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-06 23:51:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19073212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DownToTheSea/pseuds/DownToTheSea
Summary: While staying the night after the apocalypse at Crowley's place, Aziraphale is on edge about his bookshop. Crowley attempts to calm him down.





	Do Angels Dream of Electronic Catalogues?

Crowley was glad he'd had the carpet in his flat taken out in the 1990s. If he hadn't, Aziraphale would have worn a hole in it by now with his incessant pacing. (Also, it had been a dreadful shag in a sort of dead mustard shade, a holdover from the 70s. Crowley had made several questionable style choices during that era he preferred not to think about afterwards.)

_ Pace, pace, pace.  _ Aziraphale walked in a tidy line from one corner to another, passing in front of the window. Each time he paused, looked out, sighed, and resumed pacing.

Crowley attempted to keep busy; he donned his industrial-strength cleaning gloves and apron, swept up the remains of Ligur, and disposed of them. He watered, fertilized, and terrified the plants. He sprawled in his throne and brooded over the Bentley, quite excellent brooding if he did say so himself. But at last he couldn't take it anymore.

"Sit down, angel."

Aziraphale was in the middle of a "stand at the window and sigh" session. "I can't," he said. "I keep thinking about my shop. You – you're quite sure it's  _ all  _ gone? Perhaps there were a few shelves, at least, that didn't burn, and you just missed them?"

Since this was approximately the thirty-seventh time Aziraphale had asked this question, Crowley felt no obligation to answer it.

"Relax," he suggested instead, and indicated the bottle of wine on his desk with a sweeping gesture. Untouched, since Crowley had felt more in the mood for the kind of brooding that involved sitting as still as stone and staring darkly into the middle distance. (Although if Aziraphale paced any more, he would be ready to switch to the "drinking heavily" kind.) "Have a drink. Get some sleep."

Aziraphale looked as offended as if Crowley had suggested organizing his bookshelves by color. "I don't sleep! You know that. Virtue is ever-vigilant."

This was in the rather stuffily righteous tone Crowley had become accustomed to over the millennia. He tried to find it annoying. He really did. He succeeded, but only a tiny bit. (Not for the first time, he thanked Hell for the inventor of sunglasses, which among their many uses – putting a fine point on his air of careless swaggering bravado, keeping him from getting stoned and discorporated by humans who saw his eyes – also shielded those eyes from Aziraphale whenever they were in danger of giving away anything too uncomfortably genuine or true.)

Crowley lounged back in his chair. "You should try it. It's fun."

Aziraphale didn't look convinced, so he went on. "Look, depending on how things go tomorrow, this might be your last night on Earth. You've tried every human food under the sun. Why not try this? 'Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,'" he tacked on, knowing that Shakespeare was a weak point for Aziraphale.

The angel waffled. (Not to be confused with the angel's penchant for waffles, particularly waffles drizzled with chocolate sauce.) "Hmm. I do confess to some curiosity… Sleeping  _ is  _ a quintessentially human experience…"

While Aziraphale talked himself into it, Crowley stood up, found a convenient corner, and snapped his fingers. Lo! a miracle, etc. etc. and there was an overstuffed black armchair in the corner, an offensively fluffy blue-and-white blanket laying over it. A speaker nearby quietly played Beethoven. (Inventing electronic home assistants had been another of his demonic triumphs in the last decade.) The Beethoven threw him for a moment; he wasn't used to hearing what he actually wanted to hear. This would have plunged him nicely into another round of brooding over his beloved car, except that Aziraphale had plopped down on the chair and looked so dubious that Crowley could barely restrain a bark of laughter. A short time later, Aziraphale was ensconced.

"So I simply close my eyes?" he asked, reflexively smoothing the fluffy blanket around him.

"It takes a bit more effort the first few times. Count sheep, that helps."

"But where are the sheep coming from? Are they coming in pairs, or all at once, or one at a time – "

Crowley groaned. "Alright, no, forget the sheep."

"I'll count books," Aziraphale decided with a mournful sort of smile.

Crowley rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses, and made sure to carry the motion through to his head and shoulders so Aziraphale could tell he was being eye-rolled at. He didn't look bothered, though, just sank into the absurd blanket and closed his eyes.

"Even the Jeffrey Archers?" Crowley couldn't resist asking.

A snore was his only answer. Crowley raised his eyebrows and peered at Aziraphale.

"Well," he muttered. "Six thousand years and one apocalypse without a nap, that'll do it."

 

Crowley thought about going to sleep himself, but something kept him awake and meandering about his home. There was, after all, a small chance he would die a grisly death tomorrow. (Where grisly deaths were concerned, any chance at all seemed uncomfortably large and hulking, and tended to keep one glancing into dark corners.) And it seemed a shame to waste his potential last night on Earth in total oblivion.

He went and scared his plants again, but it wasn't very effective, because he discovered he was speaking softly so as not to wake Aziraphale. Annoyed, he stalked out of the greenhouse room and decided he would make it to the drinking heavily stage of brooding after all.

He snagged the bottle of wine off his desk, a glass appearing in his fingers, and poured. Then he glanced over at Aziraphale, who was snoring away with the fluffy blanket clutched tight in one hand.

A foolish impulse came over him.

"No," he said out loud, and downed the glass. Miraculously, the empty glass refilled itself and he finished that off too. "Absolutely not."

Three glasses later, he had edged across the room but was still fighting down the silly urge that had overtaken him. He had spent too much time around Aziraphale. He was a  _ demon.  _ He didn't go around doing things like this. Well, he did, but only if Aziraphale was too busy, and then only when Crowley did something else to balance it out. That was the arrangement. This was just…

"Stupid," Crowley muttered as he arrived at the armchair. But he supposed he had been stupid for Aziraphale for around six thousand years, so what was one more incident? He bent slightly and spoke in a whisper like the rustling of branches deep in the forest on a frozen winter's night, too silent and cold for any mortal to bear witness. (After all, he couldn't have those infernal – heavenly –  _ whatever, _ plants overhearing. He'd never be able to cow them again.)

"Sleep well and deeply, and dream about whatever you like best," he whispered, and stepped back.

A faint smile creased Aziraphale's sleeping face. What  _ did  _ angels dream about, anyway? Being insufferably smug with no one around to stop them? Maybe a really fantastic shelving system? Something to do with his book shop, certainly. Crowley amused himself imagining that switching to an electronic catalogue for his shop inventory would be high on Aziraphale's list of Worst Nightmares. He felt better for having thought something petty to make up for his good deed just now, and began to move away.

"Crowley."

He froze, cursing. Just a murmur, but it was enough. He'd been caught. Spinning around, he shoved his sunglasses farther up his nose and prepared to give a plausible explanation, even if the only words of the plausible explanation he had so far were "well, I–" or possibly just "shit."

But then he realized that Aziraphale was still asleep. Which meant –

Ridiculous. Total nonsense, really. And yet…

Crowley sank into the chair that appeared beneath him and pushed him gently nearer Aziraphale.

Somewhere in his chest, a sort of warm, soft sensation was growing, fluttering away every time he tried to crush it. (His attempts to crush it were half-hearted at best.) Slowly, like he might run into a curtain of holy water at any moment, he reached out and brushed the back of Aziraphale's hand with his fingers.

Aziraphale  _ smiled again,  _ and his hand unwrapped from the fluffy blanket, and it slid over Crowley's before he could pull away.

Crowley stiffened. A whirlwind of confused emotions threatened to overwhelm him, and he flailed for a moment before seizing on the best solution: drowning them in alcohol as quickly as possible. Accordingly, he summoned the glass to his hand once more and got to work.

But he didn't try to disentangle his other hand from Aziraphale's.

There were worse ways to spend a last night on Earth.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been buried in Good Omens feelings all weekend after binging the series. (Which was AMAZING.) I am SO INCREDIBLY SOFT for these angels, and I just had to write this little piece of fluff when it popped into my head! It's the first time I've tried to write them, so I hope I was able to do the characters and tone some justice! Not Brit-picked, so my apologies for any mistakes.


End file.
